The Crusades, the Genoese and the Latin East - DSpace at ...

3 An unprovoked crusade?
This chapter deals with several aspects of the Fifth Crusade. It aims to examine the ways in which
the preparations for the Fifth Crusade affected Genoa and its activities in the Middle East.
Although no cartularies remain in Genoa from 1218 until 1221, the years of the crusade itself,
there is ample material remaining from the years prior to the crusade (from 1213-14, and from
1216 until January 1217). These sources thus allow an examination of several issues such as
crusade and commerce, the ban on the supply of war materials to the Muslim enemy and finally,
the commercial implications of innocent III's attitude towards the maritime cities.
Scholarship on the Fifth Crusade tended to put Pope Innocent III at the centre of research and
use the papal archives as the main source for the analysis. This is because Innocent was the
driving force and the leading organiser of the crusade and left much written material on the
matter. It is not uncommon to find statements such as Thomas van Cleve's that `the Fifth Crusade
was to be above all else a papal crusade. '263 Innocent's writings from the 1210s are indeed very
important to the understanding of the motivations for the crusade, its organisation and the
execution of the plans. In this chapter, however, documents on commercial activities at the time
will be added to the traditional body of works. The objective is to change the point of view and to
include the activities and interests of the common people such as merchants and shipowners. This
should make an interesting supplement of economic and social material to the traditional
scholarship on the Fifth Crusade.
This chapter begins by questioning the reasons for the Fifth Crusade. Innocent III had
presented his plans for the crusade on several occasions, starting from his correspondence with
Patriarchs Albert of Jerusalem and Patriarch Nicholas of Alexandria in 1212 through to Vineam
domini and Quia maior, the famous invitation letters for the participants of the ecclesiastical
council at the Lateran and the crusading encyclical, written in April 1213.264 The resolutions of
Lateran IV were announced in 1215, which included the appendix to the decrees on the crusade,
known as Ad liberandam 265 These papal correspondence and ecclesiastical resolutions open a
window into the ways the Church and leaders of the crusade had contemplated the crusade and
justified it. Apart from the liberation of the Holy Land, Innocent had introduced on these
occasions a new theme - the liberation of those Christians who were held in Muslim captivity.
This chapter will examine how serious was the problem of the captives on the eve of the crusade.
263 Thomas C. van Cleve, `The Fifth Crusade', in Kenneth M. Setton et al. (eds. ), A history of the
Crusades, vol. 2, p. 378.
264 `Quia maior', in Georgine Tangl, Studien zum Register Innocenz' 11/ (Weimar, 1929), pp. 88-97;
`Vineam domini, in PL, 216, no. 30 pp. 823D-827B
265
`Ad liberandam', in Giuseppe Alberigo et al. (eds.
), Conciliorum oecumenicorum decrela (Bologna,
1962), pp. 243-47.
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